Bentley Speed 8

Bentley gets another shot at Le Mans.

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Also assigned to the No. 7 team are a dozen of Joest's most experienced Le Mans crewmen. The No. 8 car will be piloted by an all-U.K. team of Johnny Herbert, Mark Blundell, and David Brabham. Of course, there are no team orders—heavens no—but if three sons of the empire bring the Speed 8 home first, well, that's just bloody brilliant.

All of this is proceeding under the watchful eye of Bentley chairman and CEO Franz-Josef Paefgen, whose previous job was the not-irrelevant posting as boss of Audi AG.

Yet what's striking about the Bentley effort is not that Volkswagen is pouring resources into it, which is only sensible, but that the Speed 8 car remains, at its carbon-fiber heart, so determinedly, even perversely British.

"This car is not anything like the car the Germans would build," says production engineer Dave Coates. "We've all been brought up in the British school of racing design, with British flair and British cleverness. The Germans are all about development."

For instance? "Audi uses the same-size bolt everywhere it can," Coates says. "We make the smallest, lightest bolt we can possibly get away with. Everything is custom fabricated." As a result, the Speed 8—with about 3500 pieces of custom fabrication, not including the engine and gearbox—could never be run by a customer team as the Audi R8s are. "We didn't build it so Fred down the block can run it," says Coates.

The man behind the new Speed 8—actually, all four generations of the car—is RTN chief designer Peter Elleray. A proper English engineer with a degree from the University of Durham, Elleray designed the first prototype Speed 8 in 2000. Second-generation Speed 8s raced at Le Mans in 2001 and placed third and fourth behind the Audis. The motors were still hot when Elleray began designing the current car. Scale models of the new Speed 8 went to the wind tunnel in February 2002, and project funds to build the car were released in July 2002.

The '01 and '02 generations of Speed 8s had two aerodynamic weaknesses that Elleray needed to address: inadequate rear downforce and uneven stability. First, the car's aerodynamic package had to be reconfigured to get better airflow over the rear wing. The design had a pronounced aero oversteer. This was particularly troublesome since the GTP rules require tires that are 14 inches wide in the rear (compared with the LMP900's 16-inchers). As the narrow Dunlop tires wore down during their stints, the car began oversteering with increasing drama. Elleray designed the '03 car around specifications for the new, more durable Michelin tires.

Also, the teardrop-shape cockpit that helped make the Bentley the most beautiful car on the grid in 2001 was casting a huge aero shadow over the rear wing, as was the air-intake scoop that was situated, McLaren-style, on top of the cockpit. The new car's canopy is much smaller and the engine cover more aerodynamic. To reduce the engine cover's profile as much as possible, Elleray designed a unique torsion-bar rear suspension, a damn clever and compact unit that replaces the conventional inboard rocker-arm and coil-overs on the top of the gearbox. "The Germans looked at that and were bemused," Elleray says.

Meanwhile, the turbo intakes were repositioned to the sides of the car using snorkels like those on the Audi and last year's Cadillac. The rear wing now sits on side pylons rather than a central pylon.

The other problem Elleray worked on was what might be called the criticality of the aerodynamic package. The car had a narrow range of effective downforce, which could abruptly dissipate when the car was pitching, rolling, or yawing. The front of the car was redesigned, "following the Lola lead," says Elleray, with the wheel pods separated from the fuselage. The longer tunnels under the catwalks generate additional downforce before feeding air into smaller side radiators, set farther back than in the old car.

According to the drivers, the new car has much better aerodynamic balance as well as better downforce-to-drag ratio. "The new car has terrific grip and is very neutral," says driver Johnny Herbert, "and it's got excellent top speed. It's a pleasure to drive."

Elleray's relentless drive to extract evermore minute parcels of efficiencies is, he says, the English way. "Optimize everything." And to the trained eye the approach is quite distinct. According to Elleray, one of the Germans looked at the car and said, wistfully: "You've built a Spitfire."

It's got pace. The two Bentleys went to Sebring in March and swept the front row in qualifying, only to be put at the back of the grid due to a niggling problem in scrutineering. The Bentleys swapped fastest lap times back and forth until, after 12 hours, the No. 8 car placed third and the No. 7 came in fourth. They are the odds-on favorites to win Le Mans.

Whither the Bentley boys after the Great Race? FIA rules changes for 2004, intended to encourage development of tunnel-bottom cars, will require a wooden plank, à la Formula 1 rules, to be affixed under the current flat-bottom cars, raising the ride height. "Beyond about 20 millimeters," says team director Wickham, "it would be very difficult to run these cars." So these brand-new, highly developed cars may see only two races before they are effectively retired.

On the other hand, Bentley chairman Paefgen believes in racing, and RTN's crew of British contrarians is hungry for victory. "Everything depends on Le Mans," says Wickham. "Everybody has the will. Nobody knows what will happen next."